Dickens Quarterly

Many biographies of Charles Dickens have been published since his death, starting with John Forster's that came out between 1871–74 and continuing with the steady stream that has appeared in the last few decades (Peter Ackroyd's in 1991, Michael Slater's in 2009, Jane Smiley's and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's, both in 2011, and Claire Tomalin's in 2012, to name just a few). So it is natural when hearing of yet another book about Dickens's life to wonder what this one could possibly add to what has come before. Does this biographer have enough new material or a unique enough vision to make reading a new biography worthwhile? With A. N. Wilson's The Mystery of Charles Dickens, the answer to that question is decidedly yes.

To begin with, Wilson's book offers a unique structure and approach: it is less a typical biography and more a series of reflective essays on various mysterious aspects of Dickens's life, with chapters devoted to the mystery surrounding his death, the mystery of his childhood, the mystery of his marriage, as well as the mysteries surrounding his substantial charity, his wildly popular but probably fatal public readings, and the unfinished last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The final chapter of Wilson's book explores the mystery of Dickens's style and impact–how some readers (Larkin, for example) argue that Dickens barely deserves being considered a writer, let alone a great one, while others see him as the "last of the great mythologists and perhaps the greatest," as Chesterton wrote more than a hundred years ago. In this final chapter, Wilson provides an astute analysis and defense of Dickens's mythologizing and his powerful ability to move, transport and mesmerize readers–the "enchanter," to use Nabokov's appellation (196).

Wilson's original approach works well for the most part as it provides a compelling interpretive lens through which to view Dickens while always showing that the more one knows about the man the more mysterious he seems. "Every beating heart … is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it," Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities (Book 1, ch. 3), and that would be a fitting epigraph to this biography (as it is to The Invisible Woman, the 2013 film based on Claire Tomalin's book about Dickens's [End Page 97] mistress Ellen Ternan). The downside of the "mystery" approach is that it involves returning to certain subjects repeatedly–like Ellen, like the readings, like his death. But as these are fascinating topics, the repetition for the most part works well and makes for compelling reading; it certainly works better than a plodding chronological approach.

Wilson is hardly new to the subject of Victorian culture, of course. He has a deservedly excellent reputation for his biographies of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, and the compendium biography/history The Victorians, and the research he conducted for those books serves him well here. Wilson clearly knows the age broadly and deeply, and it turns out, he also knows Charles Dickens and his works remarkably well. One of the great strengths of the biography is his detailed knowledge not only of Dickens's fiction but his vast non-fiction as well. But what he offers in his discussions of Dickens's works goes beyond knowledge and understanding; Wilson clearly loves his subject and conveys a sense of gratitude for novels that helped him through dark times when he was a schoolboy. The passages where Wilson describes what Dickens meant to him when he was an abused youth–not unlike Oliver Twist, Smike, or David Copperfield–add a poignancy and immediacy that helps to explain Dickens's enduring attraction to readers far better than literary criticism often does. As Wilson reveals, "I had read and reread Dickens with obsessive rapture, beginning in a childhood of abject misery when his books, more than anything in the Bible or anything...